HOT NOVEL UPDATES



Hint: To Play after pausing the player, use this button

6

“Milady. And Subaru, too. So you were here.”

Julius was standing in the doorway, a trace of relief appearing in his eyes. Stepping over the crack running through the floor with his long legs, he entered the room and approached the two of them.

In what was surely an unconscious habit, he touched his bangs as his golden eyes looked out across the trampled, scorched-black room on the top floor of the tower.

“Why are you here?”

“Natsuki said he wanted to check something. We only just came up here,” Anastasia said, gesturing with her chin to where Subaru was kneeling on the sooty floor. Subaru was looking farther back in the room, to where a distinctive-looking metia was located.

It was the broadcast metia used to communicate with the entire city. It should have been swept up in the battle with Capella and the black dragon’s attack, but it had almost miraculously avoided any damage. Subaru breathed easily as he made sure it was still working.

“I see… How did your discussion with Subaru go?”

“It went a little long, but I’d say it was a constructive talk. It looks like he’s had it up to here with everything, same as me. How are things on your end?”

“As you instructed, I set the members of the Iron Fangs to patrol in shifts. For better or worse, there have not been any noteworthy developments…”

“That sure sounds like bad news. Without an obvious turn for the better, things are just gonna get worse as time passes… That’s just how unease works,” Anastasia responded as she gently caressed her scarf.

Subaru looked up at Julius.

“I visited one shelter before coming here. Any word how things are at the other ones?”

“It pains me to be unable to share good tidings, but unfortunately the situation is poor everywhere. In most shelters, the people are currently in no condition to act, and most are just staring at their feet in fear and anxiety. The cultists’ proclamation has had a profound effect on morale.”

Subaru stood up and murmured, “Proclamation…”

“Lust’s final threat before abandoning city hall. In addition to announcing the four demands, she also announced that those of us who attacked the tower had been turned back.”

“…So she told everyone we lost. Framing it as a defeat is definitely exacerbating things.”

Which was precisely what Capella had been aiming for. Sirius’s Authority combined perfectly with the psychological effect of the broadcast. Between that and Sirius’s attack on the Muse Company while they were going after Capella at the tower, despite their not making any effort to work together, they’d still managed to create the worst possible duet. And because of that, the townspeople’s will had been broken, and they were getting pulled into a downward spiral, which was inexorably dragging them further into the depths of despair.

“It pains me to say, but it would be good fortune if they merely lost the will to remain standing. There are many who are responding in other ways. Several places are on the verge of crossing a dangerous threshold.”

“What’s happening with those shelters?”

“We are rushing over as fast as we can to limit injuries to the best of our ability, but…”

Julius hesitated, but that was more than enough to make the dark implication obvious.

Still—

“—There’s no stopping the flood once the dam bursts. Some shelters are beyond saving. And there have been more than a few deaths, too. It’s cowardly to avert our eyes from reality.”

“…Milady…”

Anastasia’s words forced him to face head-on the fact that there had already been losses. A more satisfactory look finally appeared on Julius’s face, and seeing that, Anastasia focused her increasingly scrutinizing gaze on her knight.

“Pretending you don’t see it won’t make it disappear. The truth is all around us… What’s gotten into you, Julius?”

“I would never…”

“This isn’t like you at all.”

At first her voice was harsh and stern, but it gradually grew softer and more fragile, her eyes wavering. For just a second, the concern she was feeling for him was visible. But she hid it again in the blink of an eye, reopening her pursed lips.

“…There have been victims. And there will be more. Given that we are trying to save as many people as possible, there is no avoiding the fact that we’ll have to give up on a few. We don’t have enough hands to do everything. So at the very least we can’t turn a blind eye to what that entails.”

“ ”

“At least Natsuki is properly standing on his own two feet. Accepting that there have been losses and demonstrating the resolve for what’s to come. But what about you, Julius?”

Doubt filled Julius’s golden eyes—no, it had been there the whole time, swaying faintly, unsteady.

And seeing that doubt in Julius’s eyes, Subaru finally realized something.

—Wrath’s Authority was affecting city hall, too.

Ferris wallowing in his grief, Wilhelm bound by self-doubt and self-reproach, Ricardo baring his fangs in righteous indignation and annoyance, Garfiel running all over town in a fit of anxiety, Anastasia almost desperately doing her best to meet the expectations of the duty she had been entrusted with, and Julius struggling to break free from his indecision.

They were all expressing their emotions, baring their hearts more because of the influence of Sirius’s ability. And Subaru was surely doing the same, too.

“ ”

As Subaru came to that realization, Julius and Anastasia stared at each other. Julius was unable to escape his doubts, and a look of anguish crossed his handsome face as he closed his eyes.

Anastasia’s logic was sound. She was telling him not to look away from the reality in front of him and demanding he show the resolve to face a fight in which sacrifices would be inevitable. And hearing that, Julius knew that he needed to set aside the troubles eating away at him. He tried again to steel his resolve. To join his master on the path to a victory that would only open up after he made many sacrifices and suffered many losses.

If you tried to carry a giant armful of abbles, it would be impossible to avoid letting one or two slip away. And eventually the whole thing would come falling down. In order to avoid that, you had to pick which abbles to carry and which to leave behind. Even a child could understand that concept.

However—


“—I think you’re misunderstanding something, Anastasia,” Subaru cut in for the first time.

The other two looked over at him. While the feelings in their eyes were different, Subaru could tell they were not just emotional. Both were still thinking.

“I swore to rescue this city together with you, but I have no intention of trying to sacrifice the few for the sake of the many.”

“…We decided on our main goal. I was pretty sure of that from what we discussed.” Anastasia’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna start with that unreasonable stuff now, too? If so, then you haven’t changed at all from that first time I laid eyes on you back at the castle. Even if it wasn’t the usual path, you’ve become a proper knight now, haven’t you?”

“That’s right. I’m a full-fledged knight. And because I’m a knight, there are some things I just can’t give up on. That I refuse to give up on. If I gave up on them now, my reputation as a knight would be ruined,” Subaru said as he changed positions, moving next to Julius.

He shrugged as Julius stood there frozen in place looking at him, and then Subaru puffed out his chest.

If you were holding an armful of abbles, it was only natural that you eventually could not hold on to all of them. But because he was a knight, the things that Subaru was holding in his hands—what Julius was holding in his hands—they were not just a bunch of abbles. They were something far more precious. Something irreplaceable. They were not abbles that would not say anything if you gave up and let them fall. They were the lives of people. People who could cry and who got angry, too. People with families, with friends and people they loved.

“I have no intention of letting a single one of them fall. Talking about resolve and determination sounds cool, but that’s just giving up with extra steps. And there’s nothing cool about that.”

“—Ngh. Again with your foolishness… There were sacrifices during the battle with the White Whale and in the fight with the cultists afterward, too, but you weren’t spouting this same stupidly stubborn stuff then.”

“—Don’t take me for a fool, Anastasia.”

Subaru’s gaze sharpened when Anastasia brought up the White Whale and Petelgeuse. He was not going to back down on that point or let it go unchallenged. She was barking up the wrong tree if she thought that was how things would go.

“The people who fought and fell in those fights were ready to give their lives. It’s sad that they died, and they definitely didn’t want to die, but they knew what they were getting into. And that makes all the difference—we can’t assume the residents of this city are the same.”

It was a convenient argument, and maybe it did not really follow, and it was certainly easy to point to the double standard of criticizing one form of resolve while holding up a different kind. But it was a fact that there was a discernable difference. There was a certain resolve required in situations where lives were being put on the line.

“The cultists made this city a battlefield, and that’s on them. But it’s wrong to let yourself get dragged into that same thinking and start talking about resolve when it comes to the normal, everyday people who got caught up in all this.”

“Whether we like it or not, the decision the cultists made is going to cause a lot of people who aren’t resolved to get hurt anyway, at which point they’re just going to have to steel themselves.”

“There. That’s wrong. The cultists have made their own decision, and people who actually have the resolve should be the ones to go after them. If you ask me, having that resolve while always keeping that distinction in mind is what it means to be a knight. That’s how I would hope a knight would act, and that’s what I teach the kids in the village, too.”

After he had been knighted and gotten fawned over here and there, when Subaru finally became a proper knight like he had always imagined, that was the path he had naturally chosen. And when he swore to always live that way, the children had looked at him with sparkling eyes, so ever since he had tried to never bring shame to that vow.

—And because when Emilia, who had been beside him, heard it, her eyes had shone, too.

“I’m Emilia’s knight. I want to fight for her. But that doesn’t mean I’m only fighting to protect her. Julius is your knight, Anastasia. He wants to fight for you more than anyone else. If you order him, he’ll listen to you—but that isn’t enough to be satisfied. Because knights are by nature greedy people who want to look cool.”

“ ”

“I always try to look cool even if it kills me. And so does Julius. Because he’s the Finest of Knights. That means he tries harder than anyone else to look the part.”

Subaru pointed to Julius with his thumb as Anastasia fell silent. Partway through, Julius, who had been listening silently, suddenly caught his breath, and his eyes widened.

An out-of-place, satisfied grin appeared on Subaru’s face when he saw how badly that had caught the both of them off guard.

“You talked about necessary sacrifices before. But what I said was ‘Let’s save this city.’ Cities and countries aren’t just a bunch of buildings or swaths of land. They’re made up of people. At least according to a bunch of mangas and games.”

Choosing at the outset to give up on someone and trying to save someone but failing were two different things. It was easy enough to convince yourself to discard a person in order to create a world you could be satisfied with, but—

“—Infecting other people with that self-satisfaction is what makes you no good. That there’s a heroic delusion that’ll swallow a crowd whole.”

“ ”

Another person suddenly butted in right as Subaru was in the process of trying to turn his naive belief into an idealistic theory.

Subaru caught his breath and turned around. It was a slightly muffled voice that sounded familiar. There was almost a hint of irony in the voice, a cynical, pessimistic, philosophical tint to those words as the man wearing a black helmet met Subaru’s gaze.

“Stare as hard as you like, it’s not going to change the fact that I didn’t bring you any presents. You’ll just have to make do with my smile. Not that you can see it like this, though.”

“—Al.”

The man in the iron helm shrugged as he joked with Subaru from the doorway.

He had chosen to act independently before Subaru and the others left for the assault on city hall, and his whereabouts had been unknown ever since. He slowly stepped into the room and headed over to them. Still under the influence of her intense emotions just before, Anastasia responded gruffly.

“You’re back awfully early.”

“Strictly speaking, I’m not back, since this is a different place from before, but I feel bad about appearing again right after leaving, too. Sorry for being a nuisance, but I didn’t come here because I particularly wanted to, either.”

Al remained aloof in the face of Anastasia’s sharp response, but he wasn’t making light of the situation. As the mood in the room tensed, Subaru spoke up again.

“Hey, I’ve got a lot I’d like to say, but at least you made it out safe. I was worried you got washed away.”

“…I was lucky I happened to be on high ground when the water level started rising. And by chance, I happened to get a message for you, Bro. So don’t go shooting the messenger.”

Subaru furrowed his brow as Al responded with a casual tone and a shrug. Given the situation, Subaru was hard-pressed to imagine whom the message could be from.

“Messenger? Who would send a message in a situation like this…?”

“—It’s from your precious, precious princess.”

“—?! From Emilia?!”

Subaru was thunderstruck by Al’s startling revelation, and he stared wide-eyed as if questioning whether the man was serious. Because of Al’s obscuring helmet, there was no way to glean any information from his eyes, but he nodded.

“Even I wouldn’t joke about something like that. It’s exactly what I said, a message from your young master—she’s seriously doin’ crazy stuff behind enemy lines. Scaaaary,” Al said with a causal shrug.

In contrast to his usual flippancy or his stinging irony, he gave an actual sigh. He looked Subaru in the eye and continued.

“The blushing bride is waiting for her Prince Charming to come take her away before the wedding—I’m jealous, Bro.”



Share This :


COMMENTS

No Comments Yet

Post a new comment

Register or Login